Tough Times for Sycophants
It's been a bad few weeks for Alex Jones, Ben Shapiro, and Rod Dreher
On Labor Day 1973, in international waters off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey, the good ship Columbus fired up its 10,000 watt transmitter.
From the ship, Reverend Carl McIntire proclaimed his Manifesto for Freedom.
“Without free speech, free religion, a free press it is impossible to have free government, a free people, or to resist the shackles of slavery and tyranny,” McIntire’s voice crackled through radios across the United States. “Freedom is everybody’s business.”1
McIntire had started this pirate radio as a necessity. The Kennedy brothers had revived a post-war censorship law called the Fairness Doctrine and it was pointed directly at McIntire. Amongst other things, it required that all radio programs offer equal time to the opposing viewpoint — in practice, it was a way to hound conservatives off the air.
The Twentieth Century Reformation Hour, McIntire’s radio show, was a vehicle for the paranoid anti-Communism which was sweeping Cold War America. Joseph McCarthy was hauling up suspected Reds before the Senate, the John Birch Society was organizing a local militancy, and McIntire was preaching a hard-right gospel over the airwaves.
He was a firebreathing religious zealot who believed that most forces of liberalism in America were, in fact, Communist agents. He rallied tens of thousands of people in support of the war against Vietnam. He declared that there was a larger, global war on: It was not military, nor economic, nor political. It was spiritual. It was good vs evil. His network of 600 affiliates gave him access to some 20 million listeners. When he told them to take action — boycotting Polish ham, for example — they listened.
“Whether it’s via the U.N., via the Kennedy administration, whether it’s the National Council of Churches,” McIntire warned his listeners, “the commies are going to come and get us.”
And then the FCC took away his license.
The Fairness Doctrine would ultimately target a number of hard-right broadcasters, but only McIntire lost his license outright. “Jesus Christ would have been put off the air under these regulations because he did not give equal time to the Pharisees,” McIntire declared.2 So he bought a minesweeper.
It was a bold, quirky act that earned headlines straight across the United States. It was a direct challenge to “the terrible, monstrous tyranny of the FCC and the Federal Government.” The ship even had a cache of weapons in case the Commies tried to sink it.3
In the end, McIntire sunk it himself.
McIntire discovered that operating a ship in international waters is harder than it sounds. As is trying to blast out a radio signal across the country without a license. His inaugural broadcast was also his last.
McIntire and his compatriots blamed the Fairness Doctrine for their decline. In fact, it just hastened the inevitable.
After the failure of arch-conservative Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, Conservatives were furiously distancing themselves from this hard-right flank, full of conspiracy theorists and messianic preachers. That included Richard Nixon, who was reviled by McIntire. The radio iconoclast had already been saddled with debt, and with this final failure he disappeared from public life.
Their anger and vitriol was simply unsustainable, and missed its moment of national anxiety. That fact was well punctuated by the election of Jimmy Carter.
The mood would come back around, eventually. President Ronald Reagan revoked the Fairness Doctrine, but it was essentially dead by then. (Dispatch #16) The proliferation of channels, combined with the growing popularity of shortwave, meant that trying to police political speech on the dial was a lost cause. A whole new era of flamethrowers, shock jocks, talking heads, and cranks would rush into the zone.
But that one moment in the 1970s represents how information warriors can rise and fall much faster than anyone could see coming.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I want to look at McIntire’s ideological successors: The ones who succeeded where he failed. And I want to break down why things seem to be going so poorly for them.
There’s an interesting thing happening right now in the right-wing information ecosystem: It’s falling apart.
Alex Jones’ Infowars has been bought up by The Onion and is now fronted by alt comedian Tim Heidecker. The once-mighty right-wing content farm The Daily Wire has lost its founder and president, viewers are tuning out, and has just done its second round of layoffs. Viktor Orbán, silent partner in many a right-wing media venture, is out of power and the money has stopped flowing. Across the right-wing alt-media ecosystem, creator are turning against creator.
This could be a sign of good things on the horizon. If it is true (as I think it is) that Donald Trump was flung back into power by this decentralized propaganda machine, then it follows that the machine breaking down could spell the end of Trump’s grip on the American psyche.
And so, with that optimism in mind, let’s peruse the chaotic state of the madness machine.
Then I’ll explain why it might not be such good news after all.
Sorry.
Alex Jones has always had an incredible power to make people show up places with a shotgun.
In 2000, Jones released Dark Secrets Inside Bohemian Grove: A fantastical tale of powerful men assembling deep in the woods of Northern California to perform strange rituals, to sacrifice children, and to plot the coming New World Order. While he cribbed the story liberally from lizard-obsessed ex-footballer David Icke (Dispatch #3), Jones was of a new era of gonzo conspiracists. He didn’t just write about these satanic doings, he crept through the woods with a video camera to document their sacrifices to Moloch.
The ensuing pseudo-documentary is great video but isn’t terribly compelling. There are some grainy shots of blurry figures in the distance dancing around a fire, set to some eerie chants. Despite his best effort, Jones does not really prove they’re sacrificing children.
Jones did manage to convince Richard McCaslin — or, as he was equally-less-well-known: The Phantom Patriot.
A member of the “real-life superhero community,” McCaslin believed Jones when he said that there was a dungeon full of children hidden deep in the forests of Monte Rio. And he was determined to save them. So he broke into the private campground equipped with a pump-action shotgun, a pistol, a crossbow, and a sword.
McCaslin, obviously, found nothing. He was arrested without incident, indicted, convicted, and spent six years in prison.
Jones, unperturbed, refashioned this conspiracy in 2016. He changed the location from a camp ground to a pizzeria, but the broad strokes remained the same — powerful people, satanism, child sacrifice. “They go to these pizza places,” he said. “There’s like satanic art everywhere.” He told listeners that he was planning on heading to D.C. just to investigate this particular pizza parlor. Before he could, Edgar Maddison Welch volunteered for the mission.
The results were the same: Welch walked into Comet Ping Pong pizzeria with an AR-15 rifle and a plan to save the children in the basement. (He had a shotgun in his car in case things got hairy.) But there were no kidnapped children, not even a basement. He was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison.
Jones is uniquely responsible for inspiring these acts. Yet, both times, he washed his hands of the consequences. Neither McCaslin nor Welch outran what they did — McCaslin committed suicide outside of a Masonic temple in 2020, Welch was killed in a shootout with police in 2025.
These acts of wannabe-vigilantes and their phantasms were quickly forgotten on Jones’ Infowars. But he remained obsessed with actual incidents of mass violence — like Sandy Hook.
While the shell casings were still warm, Jones began alleging there had been no school shooting at all — the idea that 26 children and teachers were massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary a few weeks before Christmas was a lie concocted and sold by the powers that be.
There was a “90%” probability that the shooting was a false flag attack, he told the Infowars fanbase. There was credible evidence that the children and parents were “crisis actors.”
Jones didn’t just make this claim in the weeks after the 2012 shooting. He and his employees brought it up again and again and again in the years that followed. And, as you probably know, the families and victims of the shooting launched a massive defamation suit against Jones and his companies — and won.
Across a span of cases, courts awarded $1.3 billion in damages from Jones to the Sandy Hook families. Bankruptcy courts have been carving up the conspiracy empire to try and cover some of that massive amount.
One of the bidders on this Infowars firesale has been The Onion, which offered to pay $81,000 per month to license the Infowars brand and to take over its digital assets. While the case has become something of a mess, things are looking good for the satire site’s cannibalization of Jones’ brand.
Satire can only do so much to beat fascism. It certainly can’t do so if other antibodies of our democracy aren’t working. But it is, at the very least, a bit of karmic justice, as I explained on CBC’s Commotion podcast this past week:
This jokey takeover of Infowars comes at a profoundly weird time. Because Jones has actually been offside MAGA, at least on some big issues, in recent months.
Jones has been feverishly talking about the Epstein files — claiming, as he does, that they prove a “satanic death cult” which ate children — even as they’ve become a massive political liability for Trump. Jones’ constant cries of an “FBI/DOJ coverup,” directly implicating Trump, isn’t helpful either.
More problematic for the president, Jones has spearheaded a revolt against Trump over the Iran war. In March, he even had on Stewart Rhodes — former head of the Oath Keeper militia and January 6 ringleader — to claim that the war was a deep state plot to distract Trump from the real priorities. (Rounding up treasonous swamp monsters.)When Proud Boys founder and professional troll Gavin McInnes joined the broadcast, he was even more direct: “I’m off the Trump train.”
Jones had so irked the president that Trump delivered one of his trademark screeds on Truth Social, accusing Jones and other one-time MAGA sycophants of having “been fighting me for years.” Jones et al “think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon.” A lie, we know. (Dispatch #152)
Even with that, Jones has not exactly become an anti-Trumper. There’s no threat of him joining the cast of The Bulwark. He has been celebrating the thin gruel offered up by the administration: The release of some eye-rolling UFO files, for example; or the DOJ’s decision to indict Anthony Fauci No. 2 David Morens. “FINALLY,” a recent Jones broadcast screams, “action against the COVID criminals!!!”
Jones rationalized his loyal opposition by endorsing Tucker Carlson’s suggestion that Trump is “being held hostage by Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu.” (We’ll come back to this in a minute.)
All told, things aren’t looking good for Jones. He has tried to play a shell game with his assets — Infowars is dead, long live Alex Jones Live — that seems destined for a bankruptcy court smackdown. His deteriorating relationship with Trump means he is unlikely to get much of a lifeline from the White House.
His core audience will continue flocking to Infowars Alex Jones Live to get the most paranoid possible take on the state of the world, but this all suggests that we may be watching the twilight of Jones’ relevance.
If Jones was the king of the scrappy, lunatic alt-media — financed through shady supplements, doomsday ration kits, and anniversary DVD box sets of Loose Change — then Ben Shapiro and Jeremy Boreing were the buttoned-up, professional, MBA grads of the right-wing media ecosystem, financed by selling upscale direct-to-consumer goods and fattened with VC money.
And for a time, it really looked like it was going to work.
From the jump, Shapiro was one of the biggest cross-platform media personalities in the United States: He was consistently one of the biggest media profiles on Facebook, he commanded a huge following on Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, across the right-wing social media space, and in the podcasting world. When he teamed up with Boreing to found The Daily Wire, the site rocketed to the top of all kinds of charts immediately.
They brought aboard anti-trans crank Matt Walsh, collaborated with pseudo-intellectual weirdo Jordan B. Peterson, recruited the perpetually perplexing Christian-y YouTuber Candace Owens, and cornered the market in MAGA who’s-who. They sold razors, released a series of near-Hollywood-quality movies, and launched their own streaming platform.
By 2022, they proclaimed one million paying subscribers. That gave the company some $100 million in annual revenue, plus income from their various business ventures. It all fed back into creating an anti-Democrat, anti-DEI, and reflexively pro-Trump media empire.
And then it kind of just fell apart.
Late last month, The Daily Wire laid off a big chunk of their staff — little more than a year after their last round of layoffs. Their expenses far surpassed revenue projections and their audience has been fleeing for about a year. Shapiro has, reportedly, been looking to sell the thing.
I imagine it will take some years for someone to finally tell the story of why and how The Daily Wire failed so badly. But we have some leads.
Could it have been their ill-fated attempt to challenge liberal bias they perceived in Hollywood? Convinced that audiences would flock to theatres to watch conservative agitprop, they spent millions producing flashy tales of heroes with guns, fighting for old fashioned values. Their first $1.5 million foray, the grisly school shooting flick Run Hide Fight didn’t actually hit theatres, but its initial festival run earned the review: Watch wince forget. Their troll-y documentary What Is a Woman? became a touchstone for the anti-trans right, but apart from racking up meaningless views on Twitter, its life didn’t extend much further.
When they opted to do proper theatrical releases, there was some evidence for the idea that conservative-minded audiences were on the hunt for something that spoke to their politics. They acquired the rights to Sound of Hope, a true story tear-jerker, which earned nearly $12 million on an $8.5 million budget. Am I Racist? a Walsh-fronted Borat-ish faux-doc did even better: $12 million on a $3 million budget.
But they also found the limits of just how many people were hungry for overtly political popcorn fare. The period piece thriller Terror on the Prairie was meant to connect with middle America: It earned a pathetic $13,000 box office gross on a $2 million budget.
Could their woes be blamed on their ballooning TV production budget? They’ve released dozens of shows exclusively for their streaming platform: Not just low-budget talk shows, like Shapiro’s; but dramas, epic fantasy series, comedies, kids’ programming, documentaries, and a bunch of other garbage. (Dispatch #62) Much like their flop movies, The Daily Wire started from the position that television is a place of explicit liberal propaganda, and sought to offer a rare space where that was inverted. Except, for that to work, two things need to be true: People need to believe that mainstream TV is, in fact, cloyingly political; and your content needs to be just as entertaining. The former is a minority opinion and the latter is hard to do, even on an annual revenue of $100 million. (Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform, lost about four times DW’s annual income just last quarter.)
Or could it be flatlining audience acquisition, thanks to The Daily Wire’s extended universe’s growing irrelevance on social media? Numbers cobbled together by Ryan Broderick over at Garbage Day suggest that The Daily Wire may have seen a 90% audience drop on YouTube since Trump’s return. Shapiro himself, long one of the biggest accounts on the video platform, has shed some 200,000 YouTube subscribers in just a few months.
The Daily Wire can’t expect to generate enough new subscribers to cover its churn unless it is pulling in like-minded compatriots from across the internet. If these numbers are any indication, it is simply not doing that.
What about its personnel? After making much to-do about bringing aboard Charlie Kirk ally Candace Owens, the relationship soured in 2024 and Owens left with much acrimony in the air. Boreing left around the time of the first layoffs. Peterson, meanwhile, has been in another epoch of post-benzodiazepine-addiction-induced isolation.
In reality, it’s probably all of the above and so much more.
The Daily Wire was supposed to be proof positive that an online-first right-wing media operation could grow, diversify, and thrive. And it failed.
“The power of media to set the terms of what’s considered normal is immense, and it affects adults as well as children,” caterwauled Rod Dreher.4 That power, the staunchly conservative columnist wrote, is a nasty thing. Homosexuality, gender politics, irreligious apostasy: All things driven by this media obelisk standing in the middle of our society.
The solution was the title of his book: The Benedictine Option. It was a proposal for “exile in place,” a rejection of liberal modernity and a turn inward. Benedictine Christians would ignore the zeitgeist, keep their kids away from media, and form their own counter-culture: One based on conservative religion and traditional values.
Dreher published the book in 2017. Four years later, he gave up and opted for a real exile. He left his home in Baton Rouge and decamped to Budapest for a four-month fellowship with a Hungarian thinktank. He was set up with a flat in the city center and ready access to the movers and shakers of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government.
Dreher was in love. In the United States, he was assaulted by the sight of pride flags everywhere. But, he said in an interview, “in Hungary, you have a government that does something about it.” Walking through the streets of the capital, there was nary a rainbow in sight. “God bless Hungary,” he gushed.
His four-month stint turned into a full-time gig. Budapest became Rod Dreher HQ. Internal exile was no longer needed, he had found his Jerusalem.
He spread the gospel. Tucker Carlson fell in love with Orbán’s Hungary on Dreher’s invitation. He evangelized to his good pal, JD Vance. CPAC, the conservative confab, invited Orbán to address the crowd — and even held one of its events in Budapest. By 2025, CPAC Hungary was billed as the biggest gathering of “patriots” in the world.
“Orbán is the first major conservative leader I’ve ever seen who refuses to accept the status quo that says the Left owns the media and the universities,” Dreher remarked in 2024.
“I think that’s why Orbán is so effective,” replied then-Senator Vance. His approach is the right one. There’s no need to eliminate universities, Vance said, but rather to “give them a choice between survival or taking a much less biased approach to teaching.”
Orbán did, indeed, do exactly that. (Although he shut down universities, too.) And this strategy extended to the media.
“Have your own media,” he told CPAC. The goal must not just be to win elections, he said, it had to be to change culture. And to do that, he droned on, figures like Tucker Carlson “should be broadcast day and night.” That’s what Orbán did. His regime leaned on actual journalism, marginalized or bought out critical outlets, and weaponized state media to become cheerleaders of his government. And Dreher, Vance, Carlson, and the whole lot held it up as a success story.
And then something funny happened. Orbán lost.
His successor, Péter Magyar, made international headlines for appearing on the pro-Orbán state media and calling out their censorial hypocrisy right to their face. He declared that the state would no longer fund CPAC: Suggesting that Orbán had diverted state funds to the partisan group. And he chased Rod Dreher out of Hungary.
Dreher, of course, says it has nothing to do with the election results — though he admits his Orbánist thinktank is unlikely to survive under the new somewhat-liberal government. And we know that Orbán-linked thinktank kept Dreher on a $100,000 retainer. At one point, he was given a government contract to write positive things about Hungary in the American press. He never disclosed this contract, not even when he conducted a one-on-one interview with his paymaster, Orbán.
His compatriot, Christopher Rufo, was paid $35,000 to deliver a couple of lectures and publish a few articles. (Dispatch #98)
We don’t know, yet, just how many think tanks and faux-intellectuals were sucking on Orbán’s teat. We know those that did take the money were notorious for accusing liberals, George Soros in particular, of doing what they themselves were guilty of.
But we do know that life just got harder for the men who worked for a wannabe despot, and kept it secret.
So if you see prominent illiberal conservatives hitting the skids in the next few weeks, it’s worthwhile to wonder if they may have lost their Hungarian sugar daddy.
Americans seem to be abandoning the slop ideological press. And it has come quite suddenly.
The why of this exodus has plenty of possible explanations.
Two countervailing facts can be true: MAGA loyalists are fleeing those who dare criticize Trump; and right-wing audiences are sick of listening to those who won’t dare criticize the increasingly-unhinged president.
Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson were always going to fall offside once public support for Trump declined, and that is finally happening. Shapiro et al, meanwhile, are hopelessly wedded to the president, even if that destroys whatever credibility they may have bought. This isn’t to say any of these figures are going to see a total abandonment of their fanbase: Millions of readers, viewers, and listeners are still millions too many. But audience decline tends to be a self-perpetuating cycle.
This decline is also a more acute version of what all online media outlets are seeing. Part of this is fueled by AI stealing online media to feed to its users, part may be driven by users logging off. But we’re in yet another online media winter.
One possible factor for this audience shift is the wars in Gaza and Iran. In particular, Israel’s role. Like in most aspects of Western society, there is a growing divide of opinions around Israel: The right, long hesitant to question the wisdom of warmonger Benjamin Netanyahu, is finally turning on his wars. Jones, Tucker, Owens, Glenn Greenwald, Nick Fuentes, and a host of others in this alt-media space have become virulently anti-Israel — sometimes verging into open antisemitism.
I think this has a two-fold effect. One, it is probably alienating any Trump loyalists in their audience, even as it solidifies their support with their more ideologically right-wing supporters. Two, I think it is destroying their more pro-Trump competitiors’ credibility. There is considerable overlap between the audiences of The Daily Wire and Infowars: The former says Israel’s wars remain just; the latter says it’s a genocide. That cognitive dissonance must be hard to bear.
All this said: I’m not sure this online rage machine — Jones’ paranoia, Shapiro’s culture wars, Dreher’s anti-everything — was ever going to be permanent. Like a booster rocket falling back to earth as the rocket climbs, I wonder if their job is already done.
What matters more, to my mind, is the baked-in cynicism which has already permeated much of American society. Voters are frustrated, yes: With gas prices, more than with Trump’s unconstitutional and fascistic overreach. That is much easier to remedy.
What matters, too, is the GOP winning the gerrymandering fight, with the help of a pliant Supreme Court.
And what I suspect may matter enormously in the coming months is the relevance of the MAGA-loyal mainstream media. David Ellison’s bullish move to seize as many media properties as he can, such as the Bari Weiss-controlled CBS News, is laying the groundwork for another state media apparatus to rival Fox. And Fox, in turn, has become even more supportive of the president, since it first faced a challenge from further-right rivals Newsmax and One America.
The gutting of the Washington Post’s journalistic function, too, suggests more of an accent on destroying the institutional press than on pumping up its uber-online rivals. Trump’s renewed engagement (see: rambling, shout-y phonecalls at all hours) suggests the same.
And then there is, of course, the huge rise in traffic to Truth Social. That’s bad.
We can still dance to the misfortune of Dreher, Jones, Shapiro, and the lot. But I don’t think this marks the beginning of the end, by any stretch.
That’s it for this dispatch, as I claw my way back to a regular publishing schedule.
I generally hate talking about projects before they’re well and fully on the tracks, but as a mea culpa for the sluggish rate of dispatches in recent months, I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m working feverishly on my 3rd book.
I’ll tease out some more details in the weeks to come, but the book is an extension of many of the things I’ve been writing right here on Bug-eyed and Shameless. Some ideas, stories, data points will be extended and explored more deeply, whilst there’s going to be a ton of totally new and bespoke content. You’ll be getting little previews of where that’s going as I write through it.
Anyway, over at the Star I’ve been writing about how Trump has escalated into arresting government scientists, as promised. (Dispatch #142) And, on the Canadian front, I give you a cheat sheet of who’s working out in Carney’s cabinet — and who’s not. And I keep banging the drum: Donald Trump doesn’t want a North American free trade deal. (All gift links.)
Until next time!
God’s Angriest Man: Carl McIntire, Cold War Fundamentalism, and Right-Wing Broadcasting, Heather Hendershot (American Quarterly, June 2007)
McIntire’s ‘Pirate’ Radio Ship Slated To Begin Broadcasts by End of Week, New York Times, August 29, 1973
McIntire Unable to Get ‘Pirate’ Radio Ship Going, Albin Krebs, New York Times, August 31, 1973
The Benedictine Option, Rod Dreher (2017)
I lived a couple of blocks from Comet Ping Pong. It didn't have a basement, but it did have ping pong. And good pies, for DC.